Yes, I’m glad Osama bin Laden has been killed. I admire the detective work and the soldiering that was involved. I agree that it’s a symbolically important blow against al-Qaida. But I’ve been left oddly dispirited by the exultation that has followed. It’s not that happiness is unwarranted. It’s that our excessive happiness is embarrassing. Far from trumpeting American strength, it advertises American weakness. It’s like Mike Tyson doing a victory dance after a 10-round boxing match with Betty White.

In Japan, in the early Kamakura period – year 1185, to be precise – a beloved general named Yoshitsune fell out of favor with his brother, Emperor Yoritomo, and became a hunted man. Fleeing for his life, Yoshitsune travelled about the country in disguise, often finding protection with admirers. The emperor set off a national manhunt for Yoshitsune, a Tora-Bora-like undertaking in a country that is three-quarters mountainous. By 1189, Yoshitsune was dead. The pursuit, in a time of few mobile phones, had taken four years.

As no one needs to be told, the United States took 10 years to track down and eliminate Osama bin Laden. We also spent a lot more money on the effort than Emperor Yoritomo did to find his brother, even adjusting for inflation. (Bags of rice bought a lot more back then.) The professionals who nabbed bin Laden may have been very competent, but they were apparently also dealing with many colleagues who were not very competent. Imagining what discussions about Osama would have been like inside the CIA, former CIA field officer Robert Baer wrote in Time, “Every time a junior analyst suggested the al-Qaeda was hiding in Pakistan proper – perhaps in a military cantonment area like the one in which he was killed – an old hand would have jumped in telling him that was too far-fetched to even discuss.”

But my point isn’t to scold my country for slowness. Screw-ups happen. Things are harder than they look. No, what bothers me is what our celebration of all this okay-ness – as if we’ve quashed a worthy foe rather than a malignant pipsqueak – says about where we are as a nation. It suggests an overwhelming fear of impotence and decline, one that causes us to overplay achievements we once would have taken for granted. “We are once again reminded that America can do whatever we set our mind to,” Obama said in his remarks last night. “That is the story of our history.” Well, okay, our nation of 300 million set its mind to tracking down an evil man – and we got that man. But surely greatness calls for more than that.

This self-congratulatory habit of mind has been around for a while now, at least since the Reagan era. When the United States bombed Libya in 1986, celebrations in the country were widespread, with t-shirts for sale saying things like “USA: 1, Libya: 0.” (I well remember the excitement of my classmates in elementary school.) After Gulf War I, we held victory parades. Let me be clear: I feel immense gratitude to the United States military, and I’d like to see our troops get increased pay, more manageable deployments, superior equipment, and better medical care. But not everything calls for cavalcades.

We weren’t always this way. We took to the streets to celebrate the end of the Second World War, but that was after victories in Europe and Japan. Our troops were coming home. The death of Hitler, by contrast, garnered only a muted reaction. “Reports of Adolf Hitler’s death, like the weather yesterday, left New Yorkers cold,” reported The New York Times in May 1945. “They stopped only briefly in the chill rain of the evening rush hour to glance at headlines, to shrug in disbelief, before they dived like moles into the subway.”

Now, I won’t deny that I was, despite my pains, partly moved by the crowds in the streets last night. In a balkanized era, Americans rarely come together for anything, particularly their country. I doubt any other group of people in the world felt our relief as acutely as we felt it last night. But we haven’t won a huge war. We’ve killed a vicious criminal. I’m glad we did it. And we should glance at the headlines, shrug in disbelief, and dive into the subway.

T.A. Frank is ideas editor of Zócalo Public Square.

Photo courtesy of Ricky Justus.